Washington: Seymour Hersh's extraordinary claims regarding the operation that killed Osama bin Laden have been met with either denial, withering scorn or, on the part of most of the broader media, uneasy quiet.

An explosive article by journalist Seymour Hersh has raised questions about the death of September 11 attack mastermind and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Photo: AP

In a 10,000-word piece published on Sunday in the London Review of Books, the famous investigative journalist claims that Osama bin Laden was not tracked down in Pakistan by CIA work, but was located in Pakistani military custody due to a tip-off.

Hersh writes that the Pakistani military had captured bin Laden as far back as 2006 and was using him as leverage over Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.

The house where Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Photo: AP

He writes that after America became aware of this, the Pakistan military agreed to help stage the raid to keep the US onside and protect itself from unrest that might be caused if it handed over bin Laden, who remained a popular figure.

Hersh claims that there was no gunfight at the compound in Abbottabad because his Pakistani guards had been pulled out, and that a Pakistani agent led US Navy SEALs through the compound to bin Laden, where they shot him in cold blood, before nearly dismembering his body with gunfire.

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Afterwards, he writes, special forces soldiers tossed parts of his body overboard as they returned by helicopter to their base in Afghanistan.

Former Navy Seal Robert O'Neill took part in the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. Photo: AFP

He writes that the US and Pakistan had agreed to keep silent on the raid for a week or more, when the US would claim it had killed bin Laden in a drone strike on Afghan territory.

But because a US helicopter crashed at the scene of the raid – blowing any real chance of secrecy – US President Barack Obama's political staff decided to break the agreement and announce the killing immediately. Details given away by the President in his famous White House address caused the CIA to have to make up an even more elaborate story regarding the assault, while the breaking of the agreement caused severe strains between US and Pakistani intelligence services, Hersh alleges.

He says that by the time of his death bin Laden was infirm and no longer in operational control of al-Qaeda, and the claimed treasure trove of intelligence found at the compound did not exist.

The denial

Asked about the story during the daily briefing to journalists on Monday afternoon, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said it was, "riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods".

Earlier another spokesman, Ned Price, said there were too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in the story to address each of them, but that "the notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden was anything but a unilateral US mission is patently false".

"The President decided early on not to inform any other government, including the Pakistani government, which was not notified until after the raid had occurred. This was a US operation through and through," he said.

The former CIA deputy director Michael Morell told CBS on Monday morning the story was "all wrong".

"I started reading the article last night. I got a third of the way through and I stopped because every sentence I was reading was wrong. The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he's talking about," he said.

The reaction

Perhaps what has been most striking about the reception to the story, particularly given Hersh's extraordinary professional reputation, is how quickly some credible reporters have been to savage it, and how slow major news outlets have been to follow it up.

Hersh is the reporter who broke the story of US Army's massacre of civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War, and of terrible abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib after the invasion of Iraq, as well as many Watergate stories.

In a (slightly) more gentle criticism Vox's Max Fisher notes that more recent stories by Hersh, also alleging conspiracies, have either not been independently confirmed or have been debunked. "A close reading of Hersh's bin Laden story suggests it is likely to suffer the same fate," he writes.

Both pieces note that Hersh's story relies largely on a single unnamed American source, a "retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad". Another source is Asad Durrani, who ran Pakistan's military intelligence service from 1990 to 1992.

To Fisher's mind the thin sourcing of the piece is not its worst problem, rather, he argues, Hersh's theory makes no logical sense. If the deal was designed to maintain co-operation between the US and Pakistan intelligence services, why did it fall apart afterwards?

If it was to increase military aid, why did aid fall off?

And if you wanted to secretly hand off bin Laden to the US, why stage an elaborate fake raid in Abbottabad – one which humiliated the Pakistani military – rather than just killing him and dropping him off over the border in Afghanistan?

"Hersh's story is littered with such justifications: when facts seem to squarely contradict his claims, his answer is that this only goes to show how deep the rabbit hole goes," Fisher writes.

In his attack on the Hersh story, Bergen contradicts the account with some of his own firsthand knowledge.

"I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it," he writes

"The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALs had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death."

He also notes that Hersh's account contradicts the stories told by two of the SEALs who conducted the raid, Matt Bissonnette, author of No Easy Day, and Robert O'Neill. Both men, Bergen writes, "have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguards' wives".

And he agrees that if it was true that the US had discovered Pakistan was holding bin Laden, the most obvious course of action for the Pakistanis would have been to quietly hand him over.

Bergen has also returned to Hersh's only named source, Assad Durrani. According to Bergen, Durrani told him that he had "no evidence of any kind" that Pakistan intelligence knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, but said, "he still could 'make an assessment that this could be plausible' ".

"What's true in this story isn't new, and what's new in the story isn't true," Bergen writes.

Speaking on CNN later he said that for Hersh's story be true hundreds of people in the US and Pakistan would have had to have been lying consistently for years.

For his part, Hersh is not backing down. He appeared on CNN to defend the piece on Monday morning. Of his main US source he says, it is "very tough for guys still inside to get quoted extensively", and said that he "vetted most and verified" his sourcing with further reporting in Pakistan.

He says the relationship between Pakistan and the US collapsed not because of the raid but because Mr Obama broke the agreement and went public about it too soon.

Hersh has been scathing on the state of both US administrations and US journalism for years. He has also been following this story for years.

In a 2013 interview with The Guardian he said of the story of the killing of bin Laden: "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true."

He also said that "chickens---" editors were too scared to run controversial stories without supporting documentary evidence.

Perhaps this story might have run earlier, to bigger effect, if he had provided some.

It has been reported that both TheWashington Post and The New Yorker, which has published many of Hersh's big stories over the years, passed on this story because of its thin sourcing and the lack of supporting evidence.